Dell’s Services Push for Partners Takes Next Step

Back in 2015, Dell pulled together its segmented services into a unified ProDeploy offering for partners. On Wednesday, Dell EMC announced further unification of deployment services across its hardware portfolio — to include servers, storage, data protection and networking infrastructure across the data center. 

The push for services is right in line with the recent message that Joyce Mullen, Dell EMC’s channel chief broadcast to partners: “Think about attaching services to all sales.” At the same time, the company announced client services and server services rebates — partners can earn up to 1 percent when ProSupport is attached or 1.5 percent for ProSupport Plus, and an additional 3.5 percent of all other services that are included. For storage, partners can earn 3.5 percent on attached deployment, consulting and education services. 

Joyce Mullen

Joyce Mullen

In a recent blog, Anna Le, vice president of the enterprise services product group at Dell EMC, noted that expert deployment accelerates IT transformation by 66 percent. 

What’s in the ProDeploy Suite? There are three offerings: Basic deployment, ProDeploy and ProDeploy Plus. 

Both ProSupport and ProDeploy services can also be combined with other Dell EMC services offerings, such as Residency and Intelligent Data Mobility, the vendor said.

The call for partners to sell services has been on the rise as digital transformation takes root across the business landscape. Worldwide spend on digital-transformation technologies will reach $1.3 trillion in 2018, says IDC. Connectivity services and IT services, as well as enterprise hardware and applications, are the technology categories that will see the greatest amount of spend.

There’s positive news about services from partners as well. They’re reporting that the growth of services revenue as part of overall revenue is increasing. In the 2018 State of Partner survey by PartnerPath, solution providers (the catch-all term used for VARs, MSPs, system integrators, service providers, consultants and agents in the report) are expecting aggressive growth this year – 11-20 percent, much of that coming from services versus vendor product.